RHIVU

Presentation

The project “Hydrological Rehabilitation of Urban Road Structures (RHIVU in Spanish)”, with reference BIA2012-32463, is financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through the State General Budget (PGE in Spanish) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF or FEDER in Spanish).

This research aims at preventing floods and diffuse contamination phenomena by multifunctional urban surfaces, which apart from bearing the traffic for which they are designed, offer an improved hydrological performance. For this, innovative construction materials will be designed that allow design layers of resisting pavements, suitable from the hydraulic point of view, together with that of the urban surface rainwater depuration.

This project aims to make use of the chance that the urban rehabilitation process supposes to avoid the massive use of impervious surfaces, what has worsened the floods and diffuse contamination problems in cities. The starting hypothesis is the assumption that combining innovative construction materials it is possible to obtain urban pavements that both bear any kind of traffic and manage rainwater in origin, avoiding the floods and diffuse contamination problems.

The specific objectives around which the project methodology organizes are:

• Characterize the innovative construction materials resistance for the re-design of road infrastructures which make posible the city hydrological rehabilitation.
• Study the hydraulic capacity of the new designs.
• Study the purification capacity.
• Prepare a multicriteria methodology of localization and selection that allows the urban hydrological rehabilitation by the construction of new sections of road infrastructures.